The First Global Generation in Human History
An Introduction
Hello, I am John Slade, born in America, now living in Norway. I am a teacher,and I have worked with wonderful, bright, highly motivated students in classrooms from California to New York, on the island of Saint Croix in the Caribbean, above theArctic Circle in northern Norway—where I taught in classrooms with the Sami reindeer people—and I have taught in universities in Saint Petersburg and Arkhangelsk, Russia. I love working with young people. I believe in you, deeply. But I’m also worried about your future, and that is why I would like to talk with you today.
Young people of the world, you have a choice, between unprecedented catastrophe, or unprecedented progress. Climate change has already begun to destroy the world in which you will live for the rest of your lives. You can wait for the adults—the people who have created this mess—to fix it, or you can rise up together and fix it yourselves.
Yes, you have a choice, between drought and floods and hurricanes and millions of climate refugees . . . or the creation of the first global generation in human history—a global team—which will develop real solutions on a global scale, at a rapid pace, as you design and build a far better world.
But how can we build this global team?
Perhaps you are a student at a school in the remote mountains of Nepal, where the melting of glaciers threatens the water supply to your entire nation. Your school library is small and your teachers have limited training in the complex field of global warming. You feel that there is little you can do as your glaciers shrink more and more every year. And you certainly have no clear understanding of what sort of jobs, or career, you might pursue to protect your people and your culture from the major catastrophes which threaten you.
Now imagine that you could communicate, using a registry, a listing of schools, with students in other locations around the planet who are also watching their glaciers slowly disappear. You can write by email to people your own age who live in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains, the Andes Mountains, the Alps in Switzerland, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. You can share your own observations, your photographs, and research articles by climate professionals from different countries. Now you can understand your local problem as part of a planetary problem. And you are no longer alone: you are building a team of people in your own generation, so that as you grow up together, you develop climate solutions together on a global scale.
You not only learn about the twin themes of global warming and clean energy; you learn as well—for the first time in human history—how to learn from each other, around the world, and how to work together, around the world, as a global generation.
No more national boundaries; no more ancient grievances; no more wars. You become citizens of an endangered planet, working together to create a healthy and prosperous future for all of your children around the world.
As you weave your schools together—a weaving of schools together—you reach out to a growing network of scientists who will be very willing to share their research with you. You reach out as well to a growing network of indigenous peoples—from the Sami reindeer people in the Arctic, to tribes on the African plains, to tribes in the Amazon rainforest, to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia—so that you can learn from the experts about the biosphere in which they have lived for centuries.
Together—students and scientists, engineers and native peoples—you will build an unprecedented online Climate Library in a growing number of languages, so that students at that remote school in Nepal, or Ethiopia, or Viet Nam, can easily find abundant materials—articles, books, photographs, videos, even music—in a language which they understand.
Perhaps you want to learn more about droughts and the collapse of agriculture. Or about the threat of warming oceans and ocean acidification to your coral reefs. Or about the scourge of plastic pollution. You will be able to build a team of fellow students from around the world, working with experts from around the world, as you study the problems . . . and develop long-term solutions. You are now part of a global team, a team which will evolve over the years, becoming more and more professional, more and more able to think in planetary terms.
As your global generation grows up together, you will free yourselves from the shackles, from the chains, of the 20th century—the poverty, the pollution, the plundering, the racism, and the wars—so that you are now free, able to create the Renaissance of the 21st century, your century.
This website hopes to be the springboard which will enable young people around the world to work together, now, at a time when we urgently need to stop taking baby steps, and instead . . . we need to take long bold strides.
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All of the resources available through this website are absolutely free. Students may participate in the Weaving of Schools, and the Network of Experts, and they may use the Climate Library, at no cost to themselves or to their schools.
These resources are available to anyone in the world who would like to use them. They are not limited to students. We welcome the mothers and fathers who want a far better world for their children. We welcome the grandmothers and grandfathers who want to scrape the mire, the mud, the slime, of poverty and war from the soles of their shoes, so that they too can take long bold strides into a far better world.
This is the vision, this is the goal, of
The First Global Generation in Human History
Think of what we could do, if we would only do it.
Thank you.
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